I think Sora is an excellent way to see how people's beliefs clash with reality. Even in this post, I see people likening Sora to unveiling "a weapon", it filling them with "bland dread", or comparing it to creating "killing robots". But now that Sora is being shut down, what impact did Sora actually have on society, other than getting a couple of people to waste their time making some funny meme videos? Did any of those negative externalities actually play out?
If you are autistic, I feel that it causes you to see reality a more accurately than most here on this thread.
At least according to the Head of Product at X, Sora was by far the most widely used tool to create fake war videos[0] aiming to push various false narratives. Given how popular fake content is at Meta I can only imagine what they see there (if they even have anybody looking at this kind of thing).
[0] https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2029024577624650041
On X, viewing actual war footage was locked behind age-gating and identity verification, while any idiots' fake war footage was uncensored and consumable by anyone.
I understand that misinformation is a bad thing, and your point is taken that I was probably too quick to brush off the worst thing that Sora did as 'some funny memes'. But still. Photoshop is used to make a lot of misinformation, probably 1000x to 10,000x as much as Sora did, or even more than that. Does anyone say the latest version of Photoshop is like unveiling a weapon? Does anyone say that AI driven generative fill in Photoshop is like creating killing robots?
Sora was one of the earliest demos of a "wow okay that is good enough to be mistaken for real" GenAI model, which is what that comment was referencing with the "weapon" reference (the tech behind it not just Sora™ Videos).
Sure, by the time they productized it, Sora was no longer SOTA thanks to the AI arms race. And ultimately positioned as a TikTok for Slop with an annoying watermark so didn't take the world by storm on its own.
But since it was unveiled GenAI videos as a whole have become commonplace everywhere else on the internet, with plenty of negative impact already in terms of spam or manipulation, and we're barely in year 2 so far.